Hands On: Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight

In a single stroke, Barnes & Noble may have just eliminated one of E Ink's major downsides—the lack of a backlight.

The retailer today unveiled the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, an upgraded version of its existing Nook Simple Touch, which is our current Editors' Choice for touch-based ebook readers. What's interesting is that it wasn't done with an actual backlight, because with E Ink, you can't have one. Instead, the new model contains a small series of LEDs embedded within the frame.

Here's how it works: Hold down the Nook button at the bottom for two seconds—which, conveniently, is easy to find in the dark—and the screen lights up. You can adjust the GlowLight level either by tapping the Nook button again and tapping GlowLight on the screen, or by tapping the center of the screen and then tapping the tiny light bulb icon along the top.

I got some hands-on time today with the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight—amusingly, in a dark room, while lying on a bed in a swank hotel. Physically, the new model isn't much different. The frame is exactly the same, except for a lighter, silver-colored band around the edges, instead of the darker one on the regular Simple Touch.

Reading with the GlowLight is enjoyable—and, honestly, preferable to using a clip-on light. Without it, it's the same as before, but with it, you can now read in the dark while your significant other sleeps peacefully nearby. If you're really being picky, you may want it even dimmer than the dimmest setting, but to my eye it looked like it would go dim enough that it wouldn't disturb another sleeping person. I'd have to test it in a completely dark room to be sure. Barnes & Noble took great pains to demonstrate that you still get the same other advantages over a tablet, including being able to read it in direct sunlight, and the simple fact that ebook readers are still much lighter than tablets.

For comparison purposes, a nearby iPad 2 didn't go nearly as dim as the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight at the lowest setting. But the new iPad's Retina display is capable of being slightly dimmer, so that's one thing we'll look out for when doing the full review of the Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight.

While you can also crank the brightness to the point where it's like a backlit tablet, roughly half brightness is sufficient for comfortable reading. At the Nook's smallest text size, the light still worked well.

From what I could tell in the short time I examined the device, the GlowLight isn't perfect. At the top, you see tiny little bubbles of light from the edge lighting. But it's only visible about a third of an inch down the screen from the top. It's pretty even down the rest of the screen, with slight variances here and there. It's the kind of thing you'll forget about quickly, and only notice if you stare exactly at the top of the screen, where there is normally no text showing. The overall effect reminds me of old Palm handhelds from the late 1990s, which employed grayscale LCDs without backlights at first, but then switched to one you could turn on and off at will.

Interestingly, instead of increasing weight with the new model, Barnes & Noble also managed to shave off another 5 percent, bringing the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight's weight to a shade under 7 ounces. That puts it only an ounce heavier than the $79 Amazon Kindle, which lacks a touch screen, and is half an ounce lighter than the Kindle Touch, which has one. In person, I barely noticed the weight change, although it felt a little better balanced in the hand compared with the existing model.

As far as battery life is concerned, Barnes & Noble claims that if you're reading a half hour a day, with the GlowLight on the entire time, you'll get about a month before needing a recharge—roughly half of what you'd get with the regular Simple Touch. Both numbers assume Wi-Fi turned off.

Otherwise, the 6-inch E Ink Pearl screen remains exactly the same as before, including what Barnes & Noble calls a screen protector in order to reduce glare, although glare really isn't a problem on the Kindle, either. Barnes & Noble's Nook Store now sells over 2.5 million books, newspapers, and magazines. There's 2GB of internal storage, and you can add up to another 32GB using a microSD card. The Simple Touch with GlowLight still runs Android 2.1—a completely irrelevant spec, since it doesn't function as an actual Android tablet. It also supports ePUB files, another perennial advantage over the Kindle line.

At $139, Barnes & Noble is positioning this model directly against the Kindle Touch without ads, which costs the same price but lacks the backlight, has no power adapter in the box (just a USB charging cable), and is also a bit heavier. That certainly makes it compelling.

Pre-orders for the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight begin today, both online and in Barnes & Noble retail stores, with an expected ship date in early May. Once it actually hits the market, it will also be available in Best Buy, Target, Walmart, and other stores, just like the current Nook lineup. Stay tuned for a full review as soon as we get one in the labs.

Jamie Lendino is the Editor-In-Chief of ExtremeTech.com, and has written for PCMag.com and the print magazine since 2005. Recently, Jamie ran the consumer electronics and mobile teams at PCMag, and before that, he was the Editor In Chief of Smart Device Central, PCMag's dedicated smartphone site, for its entire three-year run from 2006 to 2009. Prior to PCMag, he was a contributing editor for Laptop and mediabistro.com. His writing has also appeared in the print editions of Popular Science, Electronic Musician, and Sound and Vision,...
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